Will BGA ever care about its customers?

[__X__]

I've been a daily user of BGA since 2020. I am a paying customer - I've certainly taken advantage of gift points for free months of premium, but have paid for several years of premium membership, and have paid to gift memberships to others. I say this not to brag, but to establish that BGA is making money off of me in multiple ways.

Yet, the one constant over the past five years is that BGA (the collective of people who own, work for and give their services to BGA for free) could care less about me as a customer. They do not care. In fact, they treat us with contempt, more than anything.

BGA's customer service is atrocious. In the extremely rare case you can actually achieve an interaction with their staff, it seems their only goal is to end that interaction as swiftly as possible.

Even when we express dissatisfaction en masse,(e.g. the 'Return to Main' button change) they simply ignore it.

I had great hopes when Asmodee purchased BGA, but there has been no improvement.

I have one, and only one expectation for BGA now: that they will continue to treat their customers with contempt. This post, like all before, will simply be ignored and disappear into the void.

[SiRan90]

Making money off you is a bit of a stretch. You have played over 12000 games since being a member in December 21.

Assuming you have paid for premium that entire time and BGA get all of the money from it (which they don't, there will be transaction fees) you pay less than 2 cents per game, and that's to pay for salaries, framework, servers, royalties. They aren't making a lot from you.

To your point, communication could be better from them. But what have they done that makes you feel they have competent for you?

[Jellby]

You pay to have access to premium games and premium features. You don't get preferential treatment just because you're paying.

You can certainly complain about customer support and communication, just don't add payment to the equation.

[Tof63]

I've been a daily user of BGA since 2020. I am a paying customer - I've certainly taken advantage of gift points for free months of premium, but have paid for several years of premium membership, and have paid to gift memberships to others. I say this not to brag, but to establish that BGA is making money off of me in multiple ways.

Yet, the one constant over the past five years is that BGA (the collective of people who own, work for and give their services to BGA for free) could care less about me as a customer. They do not care. In fact, they treat us with contempt, more than anything.

BGA's customer service is atrocious. In the extremely rare case you can actually achieve an interaction with their staff, it seems their only goal is to end that interaction as swiftly as possible.

Even when we express dissatisfaction en masse,(e.g. the 'Return to Main' button change) they simply ignore it.

I had great hopes when Asmodee purchased BGA, but there has been no improvement.

I have one, and only one expectation for BGA now: that they will continue to treat their customers with contempt. This post, like all before, will simply be ignored and disappear into the void.

I'm not going to respond to everything you said. In fact, I have a very good relationship with the BGA team
Many of you have expressed your frustration with the “Return to Main” link change, but I don't think that reflects the opinion of the majority of users. I think the new behavior suits the vast majority of players in fact...
That said, you can install this extension and configure in this extenstion settings the link behavior to revert to the previous behavior : https://fr.doc.boardgamearena.com/ChromeExtension

[__X__]

Making money off you is a bit of a stretch. You have played over 12000 games since being a member in December 21.

Assuming you have paid for premium that entire time and BGA get all of the money from it (which they don't, there will be transaction fees) you pay less than 2 cents per game, and that's to pay for salaries, framework, servers, royalties. They aren't making a lot from you.

You're making many assumptions there ...

To your point, communication could be better from them. But what have they done that makes you feel they have competent for you?

The deletion of a legacy game on friendly (unlimited time per turn) because we hadn't played in a while.

We wanted to take a break from the game. Having months worth of progress deleted without notice is just the latest annoyance from BGA. Was there any notice of this changed policy? Any discussion with the userbase? Of course not. Just one day, your game tables start disappearing. Like i said - contempt.

[nik592]

You're making many assumptions there ...

They're assuming the scenario where BGA gets the most money possible - that you had premium the whole time (if you didn't, then you've paid LESS than that for your 12k games), and that BGA don't pay transaction fees (which they acknowledge probably does happen). Yes, there's assumptions (hence use of the word "assuming"), but those assumptions probably maximise the cost per game.

Like many things, a service is only as valuable as people who are paying for it. I think I get a pretty good deal for my yearly membership - but then I also play quite a lot of games. My membership also lets me play with my partner (since he and I share an IP), and gives my friend group access to premium games, so it's worth it. Do I think BGA could do better for its users? Absolutely. They are terrible with communicating decisions, don't seem to care much about what players want (though as Tof points out, the vocal group in the forums doesn't always represent the majority), and make decisions that don't make sense and refuse to engage in discussion about them. But if I felt I wasn't getting value for my dollar, I'd cancel my premium. I'm still at a point that I do see value in it. Maybe you're not. That's ok.

The deletion of a legacy game on friendly (unlimited time per turn) because we hadn't played in a while.

We wanted to take a break from the game. Having months worth of progress deleted without notice is just the latest annoyance from BGA. Was there any notice of this changed policy? Any discussion with the userbase? Of course not. Just one day, your game tables start disappearing. Like i said - contempt.

As far as I'm aware, that policy hasn't changed recently, or in any of the time I've been on BGA. I know this was discussed early on in my time here due to a related issue, but turn-based games end after 40 days of no activity. They can't keep tables on the servers infinitely, so they remove ones that don't seem active. 40 days is quite a reasonable amount of time for a game to be inactive. If your game was less than that, then it's possibly a bug that needs to be raised.

Also, as far as I know, campaign games can be "stopped" and restarted. Depending which game it was, you may be able to setup with the same players and resume your campaign (see a discussion here on The Crew for example: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=204125). I don't know if that only applies where the game ended normally, but I would assume that games abandoned, or ended for inactivity should probably pick back up as well (certainly worth a try).

[h_illes]

Many of you have expressed your frustration with the “Return to Main” link change, but I don't think that reflects the opinion of the majority of users. I think the new behavior suits the vast majority of players in fact...

Your approach is wrong. Don't guess what others think, listen to their feedback. If the majority of those who give feedback at the proper channel (the Forum) say it's a bad change, then you go with that. You do not get to decide the opinion of those who do not give feedback.

Think about elections. If, let's say, 60% of people vote in a given election, then officials do not get to say 'we think the remaining 40% would have voted this way or that way'. That would sound pretty ridiculous, right? Well...

[Gfunk7676]

I’m becoming a bit disheartened as well. See the red thumbs thread. People are able to easily avoid players they don’t want to play with by giving them a red down thumb. That might make sense in friendly mode, but not in the Arena. In fact it ruins the competition.

Apparently BGA said they would change this over a year ago, but they didn’t and they haven’t bothered to explain why. I’m open to there being good reasons, but I can’t tell what they are and they have not bothered to explain why they changed their minds. That is negligence at least, and perhaps even bordering on contempt for their customers as the OP states.

[Boudica of Celtia]

didn't they change from rt not working in arena to them working because of complaints from people being paired with players they had bad experience with?

[Exotic Dreams]

There are good reasons for keeping red thumbs in the area. I don't want to change the topic here and repeat what I've said in the other thread about this issue.